“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

First of all, let us consider the fact just mentioned. There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death. Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming. You are alive now, a consciousness knowing itself, sparkling with cognition amid a debris of dead and dying cells; alive while the atoms and molecules of your body die and are reborn. You are alive, therefore, in the midst of small deaths; portions of your own image crumble away moment by moment and are replaced, and you scarcely give the matter a thought. So you are to some extent now alive in the midst of the death of yourself — alive despite, and yet because of, the multitudinous deaths and rebirths that occur within your body in physical terms.

I am using your own terms here. By “dead,” therefore, I mean completely unfocused in physical reality. Now your consciousness, quite simply, is not physically alive, physically oriented, for exactly the same amount of time as it is physically alive and oriented. (Typing this on June 22, I wondered if I transcribed what Seth had said correctly. Jane and I decided that I had — and it does make sense.) This may sound confusing, but hopefully we shall make it clearer. There are pulsations of consciousness, though again you may not be aware of them.

Consider this analogy. For one instant your consciousness is “alive,” focused in physical reality. Now for the next instant it is focused somewhere else entirely, in a different system of reality. It is unalive, or “dead” to your way of thinking. The next instant it is “alive” again, focused in your reality, but you are not aware of the intervening instant of unaliveness. Your sense of continuity therefore is built up entirely on every other pulsation of consciousness. Is that clear to you?

What happens at the point of death? The question is much more easily asked than answered. Basically there is not any particular point of death in those terms, even in the case of a sudden accident. I will attempt to give you a practical answer to what you think of as this practical question, however. What the question really means to most people is this: What will happen when I am not alive in physical terms any longer? What will I feel? Will I still be myself? Will the emotions that propelled me in life continue to do so? Is there a heaven or a hell? Will I be greeted by gods or demons, enemies, or beloved ones? Most of all the question means: When I am dead, will I still be who I am now, and will I remember those who are dear to me now?

[...] The creative abilities are largely responsible for keeping you alive. [...] You are alive because you wanted to create. [...] Your creative self, your spontaneous, creative self—that self that speaks through your impulses—keeps you alive.”

While it is true that the body is the living materialization of idea, it is also true that these ideas form an active, responsive, alive body. [...] These have their own consciousnesses alive in matter, their drive to exist and be within the framework of their own nature. [...]

[...] Who, for example, imagines that an idea is alive in his elbow, or knee, or toe?

[...] For a moment I was almost transfixed—for the painting, I suddenly saw, was alive. [...] The flesh and hair and sweater looked alive even though they never moved. [...]

[...] And when I looked at that one, I received the same wondrous feeling: It too was alive. [...]

You were able to sense for yourself some of the material spoken about in the Rembrandt book, so that the information does not just remain academic: it becomes alive and vital through your own experience. [...]

(“Is your wife alive or dead?”)

(“Are they alive now?”)

(“How many of your children are alive now?”)

(“Is she alive now?”)

[...] This greater personage then has earthly counterparts, each individual alive taking part in the vital human drama of any given century. [...] So the individuals alive upon the body of the earth at any given time fit together as beautifully as the cells do within your individual body at a particular time (most emphatically).

The people alive during any century are embarked upon certain overall challenges. [...]

I am saying that in a way the people alive on the body of the earth have the same kind of relationship, one to another, as the cells have one to the other.

[...] Counterparts can be better related to physical families, for you might well have four or five counterparts alive in one century, as you might have four or five family members spanning the same amount of time. [...]

[...] In what may seem to you to be an odd analogy I will compare your thoughts with viruses,¹ for they are alive, always present, responsive, and possess their own kind of mobility. [...]

[...] The latter is as alive and natural and changing as the exterior world. [...]

[...] It is natural for your thoughts to be as quick, responsive, and alive as viruses. [...]

[...] It seems to you quite definitely that you come alive and die. [...]

[...] But certainly most of you are united in the seemingly irrefutable belief that you are definitely alive now, and not dead. [...]

[...] In greater terms, you are alive and dead at the same time, even as I am. [...]

[...] A brother and a sister-in-law, who are alive, were also present. [...]

[...] In your reality you kept him alive. [...]

[...] If Ruburt’s mother had been fixed Ruburt would have had a different mother and different background, granting Ruburt had come alive.

[...] I am more alive than many who walk the face of your planet now. More alive than some of your professors and friends, for aliveness is dependent upon the state of your consciousness, dependent upon your awareness, your ability to perceive and to feel. [...]

[...] The myth of the great CHANCE ENCOUNTER, in caps, that is supposed to have brought forth life on your planet then presupposes, of course, an individual consciousness that is, in certain terms, alive by chance alone.

[...] The energy and power that keeps you alive, that fuels your thoughts — and also the energy that lights your cities — all have their origins in Framework 2. The same energy that leaps into practical use when you turn on your television sets also allows you to tune into the daily experienced events of your lives.

[...] But all of you sit here very nicely, very spontaneously, very alive, very conscious and none of you know, egotistically, how you do so or what make your thoughts work. When you begin to question how your heart beats or why, then you can encounter difficulties if you lose the faith that they work spontaneously and that your conscious knowledge is not necessary for the fine mechanisms that keep you alive. [...]

[...] It is this force within you that gives you your life and vitality that keeps you alive and that allows you all to think these fine and weighty thoughts. [...]

[...] He could have been in any instance right or wrong, but he met you squarely and spontaneously, and you felt that aliveness and responded to it. [...]

Now, in somewhat the same way must you meet your own aliveness and encounter yourselves, and you cannot do it by digging around the bush. [...]

[...] Its “words” spring alive. [...]

[...] Each person alive is a part of the living God, supported in life by the magnificent power of nature, which is God translated into the elements of the earth and the universe.

[...] These include a kind of horizontal psychological extension, the translation of one kind of dream into another kind—the transference of information from one system to another, in which the symbols themselves come alive.

I can only hope to evoke some feeling within you that is reminiscent of your own actual behavior at those hidden levels of dreaming activity, but they have remained highly pertinent in the development of all species with their environments, keeping the intents and purposes of one alive in the other. [...]

(Pause at 9:16.) Your physical body … give us time … is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version — the physically alive version — of the body of your thoughts. [...] Your thoughts are as physically pertinent to your body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. [...]

and I’d like to come alive

[...] You live then in a personal universe, in which each being of whatever degree comes personally in contact with space and time, alive with meaning, alive as a portion of reality that no other being could or can replace.

You take it for granted that you are alive in a universe that has no feelings, much less any feeling for, or knowledge of, your own desires or intents. [...]

Each person alive is embarked upon the same kind of adventure, dealing with it, however, according to his or her own characteristics and situation. [...]

(After break, to Sharon.) Now, your parents do not want you to grieve, they have been trying to tell you that they are as alive as you are. I do not want to hurt your feelings but they are more alive than you are. [...]

Now, all of you here now know that the dead are not necessarily quiet, and that there is no somber mood necessarily connected with those who are no longer alive, in your own terms. [...]

Now, it is extreme egotism to imagine that you can only be alive if you have a body. [...]